


Hydra

by DarkValkyrie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Brutal Murder, Death, Killing, Murder, Riley-Day Syndrome, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21671977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkValkyrie/pseuds/DarkValkyrie
Summary: This one is a bit weird and brutal one because my mind has been behaving weird for the last two days.The story is inspired by an old saying. "Better safe than sorry." and it's about an intelligent man who inherited his father's illegal business and doesn't want anything to do with it.  But when you stop feeding the monster, the monster comes to eat you.But what happens if you kill the monster first?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Hydra

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't use any books, movies or series for inspiration, the story is my original work. This is just the result of my weird imagination and brain telling me what to write. I hope that you like it. :)
> 
> It’s still just a story, like all of my other stores. It doesn’t have a deeper spiritual, moral or ethical meaning.

Axel was sitting on a chair in the examination room in his house, wearing only his pants and his boots. The same chair he sat every evening for the last thousand evenings. Elisabet was standing in front of him looking at the damage on his face from this days fight. His nose was broken, again. She grabbed his head with one hand and his nose with the other.

"Ouch! That hurts!" Axel said with an expression of pain on his face and a smile in his eyes.

"That joke’s getting old." Elisabet said examining the damage.

Axel laughed and blood started gushing out of his nose. He laughed even harder seeing the annoyed look on Elisabets face.

"Stop laughing. You are getting blood all over me. Stay still and let me do my job." Elisabet pulled his nose and snapped it into place. "Better? Can you breathe?" She asked him.

Axel took a few deep breaths and said. "Yea. It's better. I can breathe."

Elisabet took some cotton wool and put it up into his nostrils. "Put some pressure on the top of your nose and let this soak up the blood." 

Axel watched Elisabet wash the blood off her hands. He saw that she turned her head towards Axel and that she was looking at his torso, at all of his old scars, all of the new bruises and cuts from todays fight. By the look on her face, he knew this night was one of those sleepless nights, fixing the mess from the fight. He should have brought more ammo.

"Where did they hit you and with what?" Elisabet asked.

Axel scratched his head thinking. "Let me see. There was a guy with a bat. He hit me in the ribs once, the second time I stopped him with my arm. One of them hit me in the face, hence the nose, and I think he hit me in the jaw. One came behind me, while I was beating the shit out of the guy with the bat, and hit me on the head. I don't know what it was. The rest was just a normal fist fighting."

Elisabet sighted. "How many times did I tell you to avoid hits to the head?" She looked at him with disappointment on her face.

"What do you want me to do Elisabet? There were a few dozen of them and they had guns. I used up all of my ammo and grenades. After there were still a few of them alive. Should I have gone over to them and said: _I just killed a bunch of your friends back there and I ran out of ammo so I'll have to beat you to death. Please don't hit me on the head while I'm beating you to death_? That's not how it works Elisabet." Axel said with an annoyed voice removing the cotton wool from his nose.

"I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that you should be more careful." Elisabet said walking towards him. "I'm doing my best to keep you in one piece. Since you have been wearing the Dragon armor, your injuries went down by eighty percent. So why don't you want the Dragon armor for your head? Head injuries are the most dangerous." 

Axel put his head into his palm. "We talked about this. The Dragon armor limits my peripheral vision and my hearing. That's not a good thing in a fight. The shield on my arm is enough protection for my head from bullets and weapons for now." Axel looked up at her. For him, the talk about the Dragon armor for his head was over.

"Yeah… Yeah… I'm not going to pick that hornet's nest again. Come with me. Let me scan you to see if there are any serious injuries from the fight." Elisabet opened the 3D medical scanning bed and Axel laid down on his back on the bed. Elisabet started the scan and an arm over the bed began to scan Axel’s body. After the scan finished Axel got up and a 3D scan of his body appeared hovering over the bed.

"Let’s see the organs first." Elisabet used the tablet in her hand and the 3D image displayed Axel’s organs. "Good. No internal bleeding. No damage to the brain. Looks like my formula for stronger bones is working. Let's see the bones." She used the tablet again and the 3D image showed Axel's bones with four red arias pulsating. "You have two cracked ribs, not broken, just cracked, a crack in a bone in your hand and a broken tooth. I can fix the tooth. For the ribs and arm, I'll give you my new formula for healing. This time you don't have any broken knuckles, that's an improvement and no injuries on your feet. The new boots are working." 

Axel looked at Elisabet. She looked like she was watching at a guinea pig she's doing her mad scientist experiments on. They met ten years ago. He was looking for a specific type of person, a doctor interested in research to make a human body more durable, his bones stronger and thicker, his wounds heal quicker and his reflexes faster. Using his connections, he found about Elisabet. She was a doctor but she didn't want to work at a hospital, she wanted to do her own research. She believed there was a way to make the human body more durable, resistant to disease, stronger an even prolong the human lifespan. The only problem was that she was in debt and couldn't find funding for her research, research that he was interested in.

He approached her and told her that he'll pay off her debt and will fund her research with a few conditions. That she lives in his house, only works for him as a doctor, does her research at his house and doesn't talk about him or the things he does to anyone. She was suspicious at first but she agreed and for the last ten years, she was working for him. Axel transformed a part of his house into a laboratory for her research and a part into a hospital like examination and operation rooms with the best equipment.

“Let’s see the rest...” Elisabet used the tablet in her hand again and the 3D image displayed Axel veins, the ruptured veins where the bruises were, muscles and tendons. “No stretched muscles, no broken tendons, but a lot of ruptured veins. The formula for strengthening the muscle tissue is working but the one for veins isn’t. Hmm… The bruise around the cracked ribs is from the bat, that's to be expected. But the other bruises are they also from the bat?”

“No, I killed the bastard with the bat first. The other three guys didn’t have weapons. They just hit me with their hands, elbows, knees and feet. It was a standard fight.” Axel said trying to remember if he missed something. “Maybe it’s from when I hit the floor or from them pushing me against the wall.” He said.

“I’m still working on improving the formula for the cardiovascular system. I think I know how to make it work better.” Axel had a feeling Elisabet was talking more to herself than to him. “Go sit in the chair so I can stitch your wounds and take these pills for the healing.” 

Axel wasn’t in the mood to argue so he took the pills and sat down in the chair. As Elisabet was stitching his wounds his mind was somewhere far away. He looked through the door of the examination room towards the main hall of the house. On the wall was a painting of his mother and father. This was the only painting in the whole house. The painting was old, the oil started to dry crack, but he still kept it hanging on the wall. This was not like him, he wasn’t a sentimental person, but his mother died of cancer shortly after he was born and this painting was the only thing that portrayed his mother holding him in her arms smiling. He tore down and put in storage all the other paintings and pictures that depicted his father after he found out what his father had done. 

After his father was killed, Axel, as the sole heir, inherited all the family fortune and the family business. He never questioned his father's way of doing business and investing money, he concentrated on his own passion, technology and space travel. Space always fascinated him and he vowed that one day he would travel there. When he took over his father’s role, he took over his business. At first glance, it looked like his father was involved in the import and export business around the world. Shipping cars, clothes, coffee, tea and other miscellaneous goods from South America, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, China and the Middle East, but something didn’t seem right. The amount of money he received for those kind of shipments was too much. Goods like that weren't worth that much on the market these days. When he dug deeper, he found out the ugly truth. His father was in the import and export business, but the illegal kind, he was in the import and export business of drugs, weapons and human trafficking and that’s how he made billions of dollars.

Axel didn't know what to do. He had to do something, he had to stop doing business with the people his father was involved with. He stopped and sold all the ships his father was using for his import and export business and decided to buy shares of companies engaged in technology, software, space exploration, medicine, medical research and charity. This way, supporting these companies and giving money to charities he could do something good for all of humanity and at least undo some of the damage his father did. He didn’t think that the people that his father did business with would come knocking on his door threatening him to continue doing business with them as his father did. The first time this happened Axel came home and heard noises coming from upstairs. He followed the noise and saw a bunch of shady people in his father's office. They grabbed him, sat him down in his father's chair and threatened him that if he doesn’t continue working for their boss their next visit won't be so gentle. One of the lackeys punched him in the gut as a warning and they left. 

After that first incident, Axel started getting more and more threats. One drug lord sent his lackeys after him, and they beat him up so badly that he went to the emergency room. He didn’t go to the emergency room because he was in pain, he went because after seeing the damage they did he was worried that they may have caused serious injuries to his internal organs, brain or bones. He didn’t know if he was injured because he couldn’t feel pain, he was born with a rare genetic disorder, the Riley-Day Syndrome that left him insensitive to pain. Though a painless life sounds great in theory, it doesn’t work so well in practice. Pain is actually your friend. It sends signals to your brain to let you know when something needs fixing or when your bones are broken or your organs damaged. In the emergency room, they asked him what happened and he said a car hit him. He had several broken ribs, a broken forearm, broken leg, cracked skull, internal bleeding, broken knuckles and a few broken fingers. Everyone at the emergency room looked at him bewildered at how the man even walked with injuries as severe as that.

After he healed he started thinking about his options. One option was to continue to wait for the men, his father was in business with, to come after him again and defend himself. He had an advantage, he didn’t feel pain, he was rich and could technically buy an army of guards. However, he knew that drug cartels, illegal arms dealers, and human traffickers had a sea of armies and lackeys of their own and that at one point no matter how many people he hired to protect him there will always be more of the other guys. The other option was to stop these men from threatening him ever again. Not just to go after the heads, the drug lords, the heads of the illegal arms trade and human trafficking, because if you cut off a hydra's head, another one will just take its place. You have to start by cutting the hydra’s feet off and work your way up until you cut off all the pieces. He had his father's business book, he knew the names of the people he was dealing with, he just had to dig deeper and find out the rest of the people that were involved. 

He made a plan. For a year, he took weapons and military training from an ex-special forces marine. He hired a private army for his home security, that kept the thugs away from him, and he found Elisabet. She was the final piece of the puzzle. Her research made his bones stronger and denser, his muscles more durable, and his reflexes faster. The ex-special forces marine gave him the idea to make Dragon armor. Dragon armor was a bullet-proof armor, cowering his whole body, with discs overlapping like scale armor, it was lightweight and flexible, composed of high tensile strength ceramic discs encased in a fiberglass textile, which meant that in a fight he didn’t have to worry about being easily injured like before. Dragon armor, enhanced body and the inability to feel pain gave him the advantage he needed to make things right. He used his money to bribe people and gather information and names of all the people involved in the illegal business and he made a list of targets.

As the years went by the list got shorter and shorter and his body was covered in more and more scars. 

“I’m done.” Elisabet said. “You are free to go but take a day or two off so the ribs and the arm can heal.” She threw away the blood-covered gauze and put bandages over the freshly stitched wounds.

“Yes mom.” Axel said looking at her with a sneer.

Elisabet threw a box of rubber gloves at him. “Told you not to call me that!”

He left the room laughing. Leaving Elisabet to her research.

\----------------

The next few days,Axel should have spent resting and healing,he spent working out. He didn’t feel any pain and thought it a waste of time just to sit around doing nothing, and planning how to get the right hand and his lackeys of one of the cartel bosses. This one was a challenge. He always had a group of heavily armed bodyguards with him, courtesy of his brother the cartel boss, and a dozen of lackeys at every location he visited. ‘ _There has to be a way to get him, his bodyguards and all of his lackeys at one location at the same time._ ’ The problem was that the lackeys were the distributors of the drugs and each location cowered one part of the city, the right hand was the one that brought the drugs to them, as far as Axel knew there was never a time all of them gathered at the same place. Hitting every location separately was not an option, word about an attack would spread out to fast and they would just send more men after him.

Axel already crippled this cartel boss' organization, he killed around a hundred of his men, including his left hand, his youngest brother. Axel watched the funeral from afar and now that gave him an idea. He researched if the cartel boss had any parents or grandparents alive. A funeral of a family member of a cartel boss would mean that most of the cartel members would be at the same location at the same time. If you have money you have unlimited resources and unlimited access to information. Axel called his informant in the DEA department and asked him to look up if the cartel boss had any living family except his younger brother, the right hand. As it turned out, he did. The cartel boss has an older sister that is currently in jail, for laundering money and selling drugs, and will be released in two weeks. That was all the information he needed. Seems like the whole family was in the drug business.

A plan formed in his head…

For two weeks, Axel watched the locations the right hand visited and counted the number of his lackeys. He also went to the cartel boss' house and counted the bodyguards and the lackeys. One night he entered the cartel bosses office and took photos of a notebook on his desk. The text in the notebook was written in code, but an easy one. A lot of the text was crossed out, but some of it was newly written. At home, he decoded the text. It contained names and locations. Almost all of the names where on his list, only four were new but the location, next to the names, wasn't. The crossed out names were the names of those he killed, there were only sixty names not crossed out. His sister’s name wasn’t in the notebook but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved in the family business. Two more days and she will be released from jail.

The day came. Axel was sitting in his car across the street watching the cartel boss pick up his sister from the jail. As they drove away, Axel followed, keeping his distance, he knew the way to the cartel boss' house, where they were probably going. He followed them just in case they didn’t go to the house but went off somewhere else. Axel was right, they drove straight to the house. He couldn’t get to her in there, he would have to wait for her to leave the house and find an opportunity to kill her and make it look like an accident so they don’t suspect foul play. 

For the next few days, Axel practically camped on the roof of the building across the street of the house, waiting for the sister to get out. After four days, he saw her leaving with two bodyguards. ‘ _That's not going to be a problem. I’ve dealt with worse situations._ ’ This was his opportunity and he wasn’t going to miss it. Whenever Axel left the house he always took his gun, silencer, rope, zip ties, injection kit with injections to make someone fall asleep, paralyzed, and an injection of adrenalin if somebody tries to mess with him. 

Axel quickly ran down the stairs and out of the building on the street. He saw a truck on the road waiting for the light to turn green. He ran towards the truck, opened the passenger door and used the sleep injection on the driver. The truck driver fell asleep, he took over and started to drive in the direction the sister of the cartel boss was going. He accelerated and, at the last moment, turned the wheel towards the sister and the bodyguards so they didn’t have enough time to get out of the way. At the last second, he opened the driver's door and jumped out. 

Later, at home, Axel watched the news report saying that the truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and killed three people, a young woman and two men. Axel was sitting on the couch, smiling from ear to ear, so concentrated at the news report he didn't notice Elisabet standing beside the couch, watching him.

“Did you have something to do with that?” She asked him with a disapproving look on her face.

Axel turned his head towards her, still smiling “At least this time I didn’t get hit on the head.”

“I can’t believe you. You’re planning something again, aren’t you? You just killed three people.” Elisabet shrugged her shoulders “When are you going to stop?”

“When they stop trying to kill me! And I’m going to need at least ten sleeping injections.” Axel said.

“When I finish my research and perfect the formulas, then nothing will be able to kill you. Not even me when you’re behaving like this. If you need supplies you know where to find me.” Elisabet said with a hint of annoyance in her voice and went to the lab.

Axel remembered the day he killed someone for the first time. It was one of the other cartel’s members, not this one, he almost threw up after he killed for the first time. He felt sick for a week, panicked that the police would come for him, and arrest him for murder, but nothing happened. No one came to avenge the death of the one he killed and no police came to arrest him. After that, with every new kill, killing came easier to him. Obviously, humans can get used to anything, even killing. 

‘ _The investigation should take a few days, then the funeral arrangements another couple of days. They will hold the wake at the cartel boss' house but they won’t leave it empty. They will leave a few guards at the house and probably one person at each location._ ’ Axel started to finalize the plan in his head. Everything was falling into place.

\----------------

On the day of the funeral, Axel was leaning against the wall of the building across the street of the cartel boss’ house, a black bag on the floor next to his feet, waiting for them to leave for the funeral. Almost all of the cartel members were present. Not including the two dead bodyguards, there were six members missing, they were probably at the locations. The cartel members got into their cars and left for the funeral, they left eight guards and a few staff members behind to guard the house and prepare everything for the wake after the funeral.

Axel knew the house like the back of his hand. He sneaked in and while avoiding the guards placed the C4 and weapons in places no one would look for. He sneaked out unnoticed and left for the locations to kill the members six remaining members of the cartel who were left to guard them. He killed one after another as quickly as possible and returned to the house. 

After taking care of the locations, he came back and saw they have not yet returned from the funeral. That was good. Axel had enough time to go back into the house and position and arm the C4 where it would do the most damage. This time he sneaked into the house with the intention to half the number of guards so it seems like everything was all right, but so that he has four less guards to worry about. Axel used his sleeping injection to put the first guard to sleep, dragged him into the bathroom, locked the door and strangled him, leaving the water in the sink running. He got out through the window and went straight towards his next target, the only guard on the second floor. Using the same injection, Axel came behind him, injected the sleeping mixture into his neck and dragged his body towards one of the rooms. He locked the door, strangled him and exited through the window. The next two guards suffered the same fate and while doing this Axel put blocks of C4 under the staircase, under the tables with the food and drinks, into the bathrooms, into the main hall, most places you would expect the people attending the wake to be.

At strategic places around the house, Axel hid weapons like guns and shotguns so if anybody survives the explosion, this time, he would have enough guns and ammo to kill them without the need to beat them to death. Axel came prepared, there was no way he could kill sixty people with his bare hands, even with his inability to feel pain and the Dragon armor. After he finished all the preparations, he hid on the second floor, in the cartel bosses office, left the window and the door ajar, crouched near the door, listened and waited for the cartel members to return.

Fifteen minutes later the cars started to enter the carpark of the house and the cartel members started to enter the house. This process took around ten minutes because of the large number of people. The longer it took, the greater the chance that someone noticed a missing guard or a planted C4 brick, but it seemed that the cartel members were too preoccupied with the funeral, alcohol and food to notice any foul play. 

As soon as everyone was in the house, near the places the C4 would do the most damage when it detonated, Axel put earplugs in his ears, closed the door to the office and pressed the detonation button. The whole house shook as 30 bricks of C4 detonated on the first floor. ‘ _If anyone survived that I’ll shake his hand before I kill him._ ’ Axel thought to himself, took out the earplugs and put on a gas mask.

Still crouching near the door, he took out his two guns, stood up, opened the door and went looking for survivors. The house was a mess, the staircase was gone so he decided to search for survivors on the second floor first. He checked every room on the floor and found one woman hiding in a corner frightened. He asked what her name is. She answered. Her name was on the list so he shot her in the head. With every bathroom, room, closet, space under the bed and a possible hiding space cheeked on the second floor, he returned to the place where the staircase once was.

Axel jumped down to the first floor. There were bodies everywhere, for some, you could tell they were dead because they were missing a head or they were split in two, but for some, you couldn’t. For those who Axel couldn’t tell if they were killed by the explosion, he shot them in the head, better safe than sorry. He did the same as on the second floor. He checked every possible hiding space, including the refrigerator and freezer and all the bodies, he couldn’t determine if they were killed by the explosion, he shot in the head. He knew he didn’t have much time. The police would be here any second. While he was checking the rooms, he counted the bodies. The final count was fifty-five. With the six guarding the locations that made sixty-one, sixty from the notebook and one for the cartel boss. He collected the weapons he hid, put them in a bag, returned to the main hall, looked at the cartel boss one last time and emptied his whole gun magazine into the his face.

There were police sirens in the distance and they were getting closer fast so Axel took a grenade of off his belt and threw it into the surveillance room where all the camera footage and surveillance tapes of the house were stored. The grenade destroyed all trace of him ever being here. Axel left the house through a hidden exit the cartel boss used to smuggle stuff in and out of or to leave and return to the house so the DEA surveillance wouldn't notice. He put on clothes over the Dragon armor and went home, throwing the guns, he shot the cartel members with, into the river. ‘ _One more hydra down. That leaves me with four more to go._ ’

The past ten years he took down four drug cartels, two weapon smuggler gangs and one human trafficking ring closest to home. This was the last drug cartel his father did business with. That left two weapon smugglers, one from China, the other from the Middle East and two human trafficking rings. They were harder to get rid of because Axel had to use his contacts from here, from America and from Interpol. It was harder to get all the names of the members. If he eliminated the ones here, they would just replace them with men from Russia, China or the Middle East.

During those last ten years, he never backed out from a challenge and he wasn’t going to start now. A grin appeared on his face as he was walking home, a bag full of weapons in his hand, a plan was already starting to form in his mind... 

The end

**Author's Note:**

> Riley-Day Syndrome, that the main character has, is also known as Familial Dysautonomia; and it’s a disorder that is genetically inherited. To actually show signs of having the condition, however, the relevant gene has to be passed on by both parents.  
> Basically, Riley-Day syndrome affects the autonomous nervous system.  
> While there are many extremely unpleasant symptoms, it does also have some arguably cool features. Chief among these is the fact that many people with the condition are almost entirely insensitive to pain.  
> Of course, though a painless life sounds great in theory, it doesn’t work so well in practice. Pain is actually your friend; it sends signals to your brain to let you know when something needs fixing—so to go without it all together isn’t necessarily going to be a pleasant experience.  
> Especially if a bunch of drug cartels, weapon smugglers and human traffickers are out to get you.


End file.
